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Waste: What a load of rubbish

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of Christmas already – and it’s only November.

Too many restaurants and pubs are, in my view, pushing glittering Christmas dos with gay abandon. The shops are full of gift-boxed this and sparkly that. And you can barely get your hands on a birthday card these days as so many have been banished and replaced by their Christmas cousins. Bah humbug, yes. But it’s all a bit excessive really.

Christmas shopping

Particularly when you consider the sheer amount of rubbish that the rampant materialism behind it all generates. It’s bad enough during the rest of the year – for example, did you know that the UK produced a vast 200 million tonnes of waste during 2012, the last year that figures were available?

Commercial and industrial activities created nearly a quarter of it, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. But households were also responsible for a shocking 14%, and only 44% of that was recycled.

Thankfully though, a lot less is going into rubbish dumps than it used to. While the figure was about 90% in 2009, it’s more like 50% today and is forecast to drop to just 10% by 2020 as a result of positive action. Most notable here is the 1996 landfill tax, which led to a push towards recycling and the introduction of incineration as a means of generating electricity.

Anyway, I don’t know whether you’ve watched celebrity chef-turned-environmental campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘War on Waste’ programme on the BBC over the last few weeks, but it threw up some shocking statistics of its own.

The focus more than anything else, understandably given his background, was on food waste – a particular bugbear of mine too, especially after living in South Africa and seeing the rampant and distressing levels of poverty and deprivation there. People would give their eye teeth for any of the tender morsels we throw away without a second thought, and they routinely feed their families at a minute fraction of the cost – even taking cost of living issues into account.

Food waste

So I was horrified to learn from Hugh’s programme that a massive third of all food produced in the UK is never actually eaten. Resource efficiency charity Wrap indicates, in fact, that the country’s total food waste amounts to a vast 15 million tonnes – even though a disgraceful 13 million people in a rich country such as ours routinely struggle to afford to eat.

But there’s no single culprit here. For instance, each of the UK’s 26.7 million households waste on average 16% of the food they buy each week. That’s about a day’s worth and is valued at roughly £15 (or £840 per year).

Food waste

One issue here is that too many people simply don’t use their five senses to check whether food is still OK but throw it out as soon as the ‘use by’ date is passed. Another is that they often don’t plan their meals and so end up buying too many things they don’t need, wasting lots of money in the process. And natural resources, electricity, manpower etc etc.

But as Wrap points out, a huge 11 million households have access to food waste collection services on their doorstep. So there’s no excuse for any of it going into landfill really.

Equally as bad though are the supermarkets. On the one hand, they only accept produce that is grown to exacting cosmetic standards, which means the rest has to either go for animal feed or is simply trashed.

And this despite the fact that, in 2000 and 2008, the UK lost 40% of its potato yield due to inclement weather and made up the shortfall with ugly veg that would previously have been rejected. And guess what? No one, but no one even noticed.

On the other hand though, supermarkets also seem to have a bad habit of changing orders at the last minute, even if a crop has been pulled, which means that it goes to waste and farmers end up being out of pocket – to the extent that nearly half of British farms are now losing money.

But a third issue is actually the most insidious of all – that is, the deliberate and systematic over-ordering of goods so that stores can guard against empty shelves. Because that means, of course, not being able to make that all-important sale to people who are going to waste loads of what they’ve just bought anyway. It definitely explains the emergence of modern-day pursuits such as skip-diving.

Insatiable demand

And the catering industry’s no better. According to Hugh, it chucks out the equivalent of two billion meals every year. Two billion. Enough food to feed the hungry, in this country at least, surely?

Unfortunately, I can go on. In a disposable fashion society such as ours, Wrap says we now throw away an estimated £140 million worth of used clothing – the equivalent of 350,000 tonnes – each year. That’s just under £400,000 worth each day. Which goes directly into landfill. Not to charity shops or onto our family or friends. To landfill.

Disposable fashion

The average UK household, meanwhile, owns around £4,000 worth of garments, around 30% of which haven’t been worn for at least a year. Which means, on average, we possess four times more in apparel terms than we did 30 years ago.

But we’re not the only ones affected by our own rampant consumerism. According to Nick Grono, chief executive of the Freedom Fund, the first private donor fund set up to try and end modern day slavery, our insatiable demand for cheap goods, which rely on finite natural resources, is not just wrecking the environment.

Examples here include the enslaving of desperate migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia on fishing boats in Thailand. They, in turn, strip the oceans of fish, thereby as Grono says, “perpetuating the cycle of devastation and exploitation”. Ditto the gangs of young men in Brazil who are trapped by debt into illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest.

But the problem, as James Lovelock’s Gaia theory states, is that we’re all interlinked – and very closely. So if we hurt Mother Earth, ultimately we just end up hurting ourselves too.